Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

MARS IS IN THE SEVENTH HOUSE 215
as I write this, more than 70 planets have been discovered orbiting
other stars. If the force behind astrology does not decrease with
distance, what do we make of those planets? How do they affect
my horoscope? And there are hundreds of billions of stars in our
Galaxy alone. If they have as much force as, say, Jupiter and Mars,
how can anyone possibly cast an accurate horoscope?
Not to mention other bodies in our own solar system. The discovery
of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto threw astrologers into a fit
for a while, but they were able to subsume these planets into their
philosophy. Interestingly, one web site even mentions the four
biggest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Juno. These are named
after female gods, and the web site gives them feminine attributes
after the goddesses for which they are named. Ceres, for example,
was the goddess of fertility and the harvest, and astrologically (so
claims the web site) has power over a woman’s procreative cycle.
But Ceres was discovered in 1801 and named by its discoverer,
Giuseppe Piazzi, who happened to choose a female name. Traditionally,
all asteroids are now named after women. So are we to
believe that an object named rather randomly by a man, and a
series of objects named traditionally after women, really have the
aspects of the goddesses for whom they are named? What do we do
with asteroids like Zappafrank? Or Starr, Lennon, Harrison, and
McCartney? My good friend Dan Durda has an asteroid named
after him. I don’t have any idea how asteroid 6141 Durda (as it is
officially called) affects my horoscope personally. If it collides with
another asteroid and breaks apart, should I send flowers to Dan’s
family?
Despite the claims of its practitioners, astrology is not a science.
But then what is it? It’s tempting to classify it as willful fantasy,
but there may be a more specific answer: magic. Lawrence E.
Jerome, in his essay “Astrology: Science or Magic,” makes a strong
claim that astrology is more like magic than anything else (The
Humanist 35, no. 5 [September/October 1975]). His basic assertion
is that astrology is based on the “principle of correspondence,” the
idea that an object has some sort of effect on reality by analogy,
not by physical cause. In other words, Mars, being red, is associated
with blood, danger, and war. There is no physical association